The End of an Era, and the Cult of the Constitution.
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 July 2019
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a week marked by rising rancor, when racist rhetoric ricocheted out of the president’s twitter feed and into a chanting crowd at his reelection rally, the end of an era almost slid under the radar. Dahlia Lithwick reflects on the passing of Justice John Paul Stevens, and the more than symbolic shift from his jurisprudence, his character, to our current state of affairs at the high court and beyond. You can read more here. And Dahlia is joined by Professor Mary Anne Franks of the University of Miami Law School to talk about her book, “The Cult of the Constitution”, how growing up among christian fundamentalists helped her write a book about constitutional extremists, and why there’s still hope for America’s faulty founding document.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There's no plausible, intelligible reason for us to continue to tell ourselves this fairy tale. |
| 0:10.1 | They're especially not in this day and age. |
| 0:11.6 | And we have seen the consequences of not confronting this, of pretending as though our founding was anything other than what it was. |
| 0:18.7 | And it is long past time for us to do something |
| 0:21.2 | in terms of actually facing it and trying to reckon with it. |
| 0:30.3 | Hi, and welcome back to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the law, the rule of law, and the Supreme |
| 0:36.0 | Court. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and I cover those things for Slate. |
| 0:39.9 | This week, amidst all of the tweeting and the Jeffrey Epstein and the Michael Cohen and the new illegal asylum orders, |
| 0:48.1 | the American legal world actually lost a giant in the person of John Paul Stevens, former Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, |
| 0:55.5 | who died at age 99 from complications following a stroke. |
| 0:59.9 | The tributes and the remembrances in recent days got overshadowed by some of the most rancorous |
| 1:05.5 | behavior Washington has ever seen, and that's too bad. |
| 1:09.1 | Just reading the accolades offered up by his former clerks |
| 1:12.8 | who revered him and his colleagues at the High Court, who all seem well aware that his |
| 1:19.8 | death represents the absolute end of an era. It served to remind all of us about the dying |
| 1:25.4 | values of civility, soft-spokenness, temperateness, generosity. |
| 1:31.3 | Justice Stevens always, always opened his questions at oral argument with, may I just ask? |
| 1:36.3 | And that was right before he would slice an argument into gentle, symmetrical ribbons. |
| 1:41.5 | This fall, we will, I promise, dedicate an entire episode to Justice Stevens, |
| 1:46.6 | his life, his jurisprudence, and we'll talk to some of his former clerks and oral advocates |
| 1:51.7 | about his really controversial decisions in the flag burning and voter ID cases and all the |
| 1:58.3 | ways in which a, quote, moderate conservative became eventually the court's liberal lion. |
... |
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